His name is Ken Caldwell, and NCAA investigators determined that he and associate Brandon Bender, a former Louisville basketball player, provided benefits worth more than $16,000 to three college athletics prospects and two student-athletes at Central Florida, including travel, cash, tuition payments and a laptop—and had such extensive contact with six basketball recruits and five in football that "several prospects and parents" believed one "was a coach for the university."

For this and other offenses, including the dreaded “lack of institutional control,” UCF had both its football and basketball programs banned from postseason competition for a year, was fined $50,000 and placed on five years’ probation, forfeited scholarships in both sports and had various recruiting restrictions placed on coaches. UCF has said it plans to appeal the football bowl ban, which also makes the Golden Knights ineligible for the Conference USA championship game this year. UCF will move into the Big East in the 2013-14 school year.

Caldwell said in a YouTube posting late Wednesday that the situation has been “blown out of proportion, due to my background. Had I not had a criminal background, this wouldn’t even be news.”

He almost certainly knows this is wrong, of course. Although The New York Times reported Caldwell had multiple felony convictions on his record, receiving a six-year sentence for a 1991 home invasion and another six-year term in 1998 for possession of a stolen vehicle, the NCAA was bound to be less concerned about those matters than Caldwell’s apparent ties to a sports agency. In its April 2011 article on Caldwell’s alleged involvement with UCF’s recruitment of basketball guard Kevin Ware, now at Louisville, the Times found Caldwell’s LinkedIn page listed him as being a recruiter of potential clients for ASM Sports, which is run by prominent agent Andy Miller.

In his YouTube video, Caldwell declared, “Do I have affiliations with agents? Yes. I know them all. I know everyone in basketball. People know me. That is not a crime. That is not an infraction. That is not a violation.”

Although it is not an NCAA rules infraction for Caldwell to be affiliated with an agent, one of them or all of them, it does become problematic if he has any involvement with a college’s recruitment of a prospect.

Because of his relationship with Knights guard A.J. Rompza, a four-year regular for the Knights who scored 741 career points, UCF self-imposed the forfeiture of all victories in which he competed from 2008-12. Caldwell referred to himself as being like Rompza’s “second dad;” both are from the Chicago area.

“If your second father cannot give you money, who can?” Caldwell said in his video. “It’s a violation to give someone you love, someone you care about, money? It’s a violation to say you can’t, in my world.”

He said college coaches call him “all the time” to ask his opinion about whether players are capable of helping their programs. “If I see a kid that I think can hoop, I’m telling people about him,” he said. He insisted he was not doing this for his own financial gain.

“Have I made a dollar in this game? Absolutely not. Have I spent my own money in this game? Hell, yeah,” Caldwell said. “The NCAA chose to use me as a scapegoat. I’m not going to back down. I have nothing to hide and nothing to lose.”

He said the “funniest thing” about the allegations, presumably because his agency connections were a factor in the NCAA rulings, is that “Everyone they’re talking about is not a pro. Everyone they’re talking about is not on the lips of NBA people right now.”

Caldwell said his endorsement of UCF to various prospects was based on his personal experience visiting the college because of Rompza’s presence there and was presented to athletes or their families who sought advice from him. He said phone records the NCAA had accessed demonstrated that recruits’ families had initiated the contact.

“I don’t like how the University of Central Florida has thrown myself and others under the bus, as if they never knew me or others,” Caldwell said. “I’m just definitely not going to sit here and allow the NCAA to go out there and say whatever they want to say and have everyone out here form an opinion that I am just a bad guy, that I brought down a program, that I am the center of it all because I have a background.

“They need to look at those people on that side. So many people leave the NCAA because of their practices.”